NEON’s iWave bridges the business process divide

2000-06-07

World religions are defined by some as "different ways up the same mountain" - a phrase that could also be applied to the ever-converging domains of IT software. The border between enterprise packages and bespoke applications is becoming ever more fuzzy, and the question is moving from whether to build or buy, towards how to achieve business solutions with both. At the same time, the business (by which we mean all non-technical elements of an organisation) is playing an increasing part in defining technical solutions. In fact, in a number of areas there is little division between the two: take, for example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in which business capabilities are largely dictated by the underlying technology services.

One of the keys to resolving the increasingly disparate portfolio of applications has been the provision of integration software, a family which includes middleware, messaging and, more recently, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) packages. This latter group does what it says on the box - it provides a means of communication between enterprise applications such as CRM and ERP packages. It is widely admitted that EAI companies have their work cut out, largely because the scale of the problem is far greater than can be resolved by simple means. Analyst firms report that EAI is in its infancy - it may be able to deal with standard integration paths between common applications but can flounder when faced with more difficult environments.

Rather than attempt to be all things to all applications, one vendor is adopting a different tack. NEON Systems, responsible for the software which has enabled Thompson Holidays to power its Just web travel service, is to extend its iWave range of EAI software to support business processes. This merits a little explanation.

iWave Integrator is a many to many EAI product. In other words, it can be used to enable communications between multiple enterprise applications. The product currently supports the gamut of CRM and help desk products, so if for example a customer service call was being dealt with using Peregrine, a request could be passed to Siebel to provide the customer's sales history. iWave does not use a hub approach, rather a management console permits the registration of different packages and platforms.

iWave Integrator works by allowing the registration of a number of objects that are supported by a packaged application (such as 'customer', 'order' and so on) and the definition of a number of verbs which can be associated with each object. For example, 'customer' may support 'create' and 'delete' as well as more complex verbs such as 'make purchase' or 'change address'. Thus far, however, each application is acting as a separate entity - either of the packages, or none, can act as "master". All that is provided is a means of communication between the two.

Now, get ready for the exciting bit. What if, rather than using these objects and verbs as a common language for packages to communicate, they were used to build business processes in their own right? This is exactly what NEON Systems are doing. A new facility, to be known as iWave Business Flow, is on the launch pad: this enables the graphical construction of workflows that can then be executed using the objects and verbs of the packages available. In one fell swoop, the EAI platform has become a tool for combining package functionality to define and automate business processes. This is powerful stuff.

There may still be some weaknesses in NEON System's approach and products. iWave Business Flow has not yet been released, and its first version is likely to have its limitations as first versions do. Also, iWave Integrator currently lacks connectors for the wide range of packages a fully-fledged EAI environment should be able to support (such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Broadvsison and the like - although we are assured that these will be available within the next few months). Nonetheless, iWave is an innovative facility that bridges the gap between package integration and application development. It uses 'objects' and 'verbs' as its terminology, but it could so easily have used 'components' and 'services'. Furthermore, the iWave portfolio includes an Interface Development Kit which permits the creation of bespoke interfaces to legacy or hand-crafted applications.

The different approaches taken by IT software may well be different sides of the same mountain, but what they boil down to is delivery of software functionality that automates business processes. Coming from an EAI position, NEON Systems seem to have grasped this fundamental and looks prepared to run with it. We can only hope that the iWave products, when they come fully integrated with a workflow engine, live up to their aspirations.

(First published 7 June 2000)

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